Excluding Your Own Traffic From Google Analytics Reports

When I start working with a new website one of the first things I like to get access to is the Google Analytics. It’s full of rich data and a gives me a great idea of how the site is performing which I use later down the road to show clients their traffic growth.

Google Analytics has a great feature called Filters. There are more than a few reasons to use filters, but today I want to share just one of those reasons. That is, excluding your own traffic from Google Analytics reports. Whether it’s just you working on the site or even if you have a whole office of employees, these visits can begin to skew the data. By using an IP address Filter we can exclude visits from showing as traffic.

Before We Start

Boring Disclaimer: Because Filters manipulate incoming information to your account, I advise you to have Master Profile View that has no filters applied to it. This way you will always have a view that collects raw, unaltered data. So we first begin by setting up a new Test View to apply the filter to.

Set Up A New Test View

To set up a new view you will want to click Admin in the top navigation once you are signed into your Google Analytics account. (Note: you will need admin access to add filters)

Once in Admin navigate to the View drop down. Here we will want to name a new view that we will apply the filter to. You can name the new view anything you want so you will know which one it is. I named mine Edited View for general purposes.

Great! Now that we have the new profile, let’s get to doing the important stuff and add the filter.

Add Our New Filter

Navigate back to the Admin page, make sure your new view is selected and click on Filters. Now click on +New Filter. Follow the screenshot below for all settings. Use a Filter Name that makes sense for you, ie. Home Office, Office, Spunger Office. You will want to select Filter Type > Predefined. Then exclude >> traffic from the IP addresses >> that are equal to.

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